Thursday, April 20, 2017

THE AX – Donald E. Westlake

Almost
afraid to admit it in a crime fiction community, but The
Ax
is the first of Donald E. Westlake's many highly acclaimed novels
I've read. Doubly dangerous to be posting my report on this blog,
risking its being seen by my literary advisor, Fictionaut's
Kitty Boots,
who most certainly
would allow
an
inquiring
eyebrow to
ascendover
a second consecutive popular crime novel in this space instead of
something more literary. To her I would appeal for lenience in that
both The New York Times and
Washington Post critics raved
in
their reviews of The
Ax.
D.
Keith Mano in the
Timespresumably
stifled a gasp at
its "excruciating brilliance." Too, Ms. Boots likes dark,
and The
Ax,
as one might guess from its title,isindubitably
dark.
Right from its opening sentence:
"I’ve
never actually killed anybody before, murdered another person,
snuffed out another human being."

Soon enough our narrator is
watching a TV news account of two of his murders:

It’s strange, but someway or
other I don’t entirely recognize my actions from the blonde woman’s
recountal. The facts are essentially right; I did chase the wife
across the lawn and shoot her there, and I did intercept the husband
in the garage and shoot him there, and I did leave without a trace,
without witnesses, without clues in my wake.

But somehow the tone is all
wrong, the sense of it, the feeling of it. These words she
uses—“brutal” “savage” “cold-hearted”—give completely
the wrong impression. They leave out the error that caused it all.
They leave out the panic and confusion. They leave out the trembling,
the sweating, the icy fear.

By now I'm
the narrator. This happens routinely with me when I read first-person
stories.
I identify with the one
telling the story—even
if he or she is
not likeable. I can't help it. Sort of a reader's Stockholm Syndrome
maybe. I can think of only one instance
when a first-person
narrator, a psychotic serial killer, was so despicable, so repugnant
that I could not stay with him. When I could see I was becoming him,
I abandoned the book and took a hot shower. No such trouble being
Burke Devore. I didn't especially like him, but then
I don't especially like myself. I
couldn't help empathizing with Devore.
Considering his
circumstances, it was hard to dismiss
his rationale for responding the
way he does.

He's been out of work a couple
of years. The specialty paper mill where he was a manager merged with
a Canadian company and moved his job across the border. His once
comfortable life with a loving wife and two teenage kids is coming
undone. He isn't the only victim. Corporate downsizing and
middle-management layoffs are rife. He gets philosophical
periodically to bolster his resolve. And he makes sense. This is
happening in 1997. It's gotten steadily worse since then:

Long-term joblessness, it
hurts everything. Not just the discarded worker, but everything.
Maybe it’s wrong of me, snobbish or something, to think this hits
the middle class more than other people, because I’m middle class
(and trying to stay middle class), but I do think it does, it hurts
us more. The people at the extremes, the poor and the very rich, are
used to the idea that life has great swings, now you’re doing well,
now you’re doing badly. But the middle class is used to a smooth
progress through life. We give up the highs, and in return we’re
supposed to be protected from the lows. give our loyalty to a
company, and in return they’re supposed to give us a smooth ride
through life. And now it isn’t happening, and we feel betrayed.

He illustrates this betrayal
with a lesson from Scottish history. Tenant farmers in the Highlands
there, who for generations had rented land, living in little stone
houses they'd built themselves, were forced to leave when the
landowners decided raising sheep would bring in more money than the
farmers' rent. Called “the Clearance,” this process started near
the end of the 18th century and continued for decades.
Devore gives us one of the Oxford English Dictionary's definitions of
clearance:The clearing (of land) by the removal of wood,
old houses, inhabitants, etc. "You’ll never see a clearer
proof that history is written by the winners," he concludes.
"Just think; one comma less, and the inhabitants would have
fallen into the etc. It’s the descendants of those landlords that
are doing the clearances called downsizing now. The literal
descendants, sometimes, and the spiritual descendants always."

They left, not willingly. Some
went to Ireland, some went to North America, some went to hell. Some
died of cold or starvation. Some resisted, and were given the chop
right there, on their own land. Well, no; not their own land.

“Some resisted.” Devore
decides to follow their example to save his way of life and that of
his family. He decides to be a deliverer of “the chop” rather
than the choppers' victim. He chooses as his victims not the
corporate heads who are doing the modern clearances, but competitors
for his one chance to get a “position” similar to one he'd been
chopped from. He studies the trade journals until he finds a suitable
mill that looks secure enough to avoid the kind of downsizing running
rampant in the paper production industry. He decides to “create”
a job for him there by killing the man already holding it. Next he
creates a letterhead purporting to be a small mill, and takes out ads
in the trade journals seeking someone to fill the kind of position
he's seeking. He's soon flooded with applicants. He studies their
resumés, winnowing them down to the six who likely would
best him competing for the vacancy that will soon open up
unexpectedly. Now he sets out to kill his six competitors.

I'm not with him at this
point. Not yet. The empathy's not quite there. But Devore slowly wins
me over. It helps that he doesn't like what he believes he has to do.
He's basically decent. He doesn't celebrate after he's “snuffed
out” one of his victims:

I’m weeping when I get back
to the motel, still weeping. I feel so weak I can barely steer,
hardly press my foot against the accelerator and, at last, the brake.

The Luger is still in my
pocket. It weighs me down on the right side, dragging down on me so
that I stumble as I move from the Voyager to the door to my room.
Then the Luger bangs against my hand, interfering with me, while I
try to get into my pants pocket for the key, the key to the room.

At last. I have the key, I get
it into the lock, I open the door. All of this is mostly by feel,
because I’m sobbing, my eyes are full of tears, everything swims. I
push the door open, and the room that was going to be warm and homey
is underwater, afloat, cold and wet because of my tears.

No crocodile tears, these. The
guy's a wreck, continually arguing with himself about this “project.”
And this:

I must have been crazy, out of
my mind. How could I have done these things? Herbert Herbert Everly.
Edward Ricks, and his poor wife. And now Everett Dynes. He was like
me, he should be my friend, my ally, we should work together against
our common enemies. We shouldn’t claw each other, down here in the
pit, fight each other for scraps, while they laugh up above. Or, even
worse; while they don’t even bother to notice us, up above.

But:

The millennium is shaking us
up, the way a high-pitched tone shakes up a dog. [...]

And that’s why I woke up in
terror, thinking, What am I becoming? What have I become?

I’m not a killer. I’m not
a murderer, I never was, I don’t want to be such a thing, soulless
and ruthless and empty. That’s not me. What I’m doing now I was
forced into, by the logic of events; the shareholders’ logic, and
the executives’ logic, and the logic of the marketplace, and the
logic of the workforce, and the logic of the millennium, and finally
by my own logic.

Show me an alternative, and
I’ll take it. What I’m doing now is horrible, difficult,
frightening, but I have to do it to save my own life. [...]

I’m harboring an armed and
dangerous man, a merciless killer, a monster, and he’s inside me.

We're at that point now where you
don't want me to stop, I know. You want me to copy the entire novel
right here in my blog. Not gonna do it. Wouldn't be prudent. But I'll
leave you with this thought, the final paragraph of the Times's
gasp-stifling (presumably) D. Keith Mano's review:
“As novels go,
The Ax
is pretty much flawless, with a surprise ending that will unplug your
expectations. Burke Devore is American Man at the millennium--as
emblematic of his time as George F. Babbitt and Holden Caulfield and
Capt. John Yossarian were of theirs. Westlake has written a
remarkable book.

This was among my first Westlake novels and the problem I had reading this one first is that every subsequent novel was not as good. A testament to how good The Ax actually is, and your fine article has given me the itch to re-read it.

This is one of the few books I have read that I found 100% relevant to my life at time I was reading it. In my soul I truly felt like DeVore. Thankfully all killing took place only in my dark imagination. Reading some of the passages you quote I still feel a deep connection to what Westlake says about the indifference of Corporate America towards its employees, youth vs. age in the workplace, and the need to feel relevant, worthwhile and appreciated for what you do in your job. I think about the cruel terms the Brits use when the talk turns to labor layoffs -- "redundancy" and "being made redundant". Talk about a nightmare come true. Excellent job on discussing what can be for many a very difficult book.

Thanks, John. It sat in my Kindle for months before I decided to read it. I'd read the first sentence after downloading the novel, and felt I really wasn't up to such a dark experience. It continues to haunt me.

I do want to read this book sometime, I have read that it is very good. Although I did recently read The Hunter, which is about a ruthless criminal out for revenge, just last night I finished reading The Getaway Car by Westlake, a compilation of some non-fiction pieces he wrote. It was very interesting.

Except for the high quality The Ax is very uncharacteristic of Westlake. He is best known for humorous crime: try The Hot Rock, or Dancing Aztecs.

For me the best part of The Ax was the minor sideplot about Devore's son getting in trouble with the cops. If you read Westlake's posthumous collecton of nonfiction, The Getaway Car, you will realize that that subplot was inspired by something that happened to him as a teenager.

Thirty years ago I attended a mystery conference where the highlight was supposed to be lunch at a table with a writer. I snuck in to the dining room early and rearranged the name cards so I could sit with Westlake. What an honor.